Twilight Struggle is a two-players card-driven game on the Cold War, an uncommon theme in itself worth

of interest. Players take the role of the US and the Soviets, each looking to establish world domination

without actually blowing the place up in the process. Brinksmanship politics constantly threaten to turn the Cold War into a hot thermo-nuclear one and the player responsible for triggering it looses. The game covers 1945 to 1989, and it features all of the key events and characters of that period. The stage is the entire globe.

Twilight Struggle succeeds in synthesizing the best of the card-driven genre into a simple and neat system, with intelligent mechanisms and plenty of room for subtlety. It includes sophisticated innovations, like enemy-favourable events potentially forced out into play by your own cards. The high level of abstraction and low complexity of the rules do not prevent a remarkably intuitive simulation of the conflict in its various aspects, easy to visualize and rationalize. The game is very entertaining and constantly engaging, plays swiftly and can easily be completed in an afternoon, which is a definitively a plus.